The telecommunications industry continues to seek ways to accommodate and enhance services available to its customers. Telephone customers are moving, with ever-increasing speed, toward a collection of wireless solutions as they expect their communication capabilities to become less restrictive and tied to devices that are constrained to use wire to function. A popular solution is a portable telephone, typically made up of a base station connected to telephone wiring and a portable handset wirelessly communicates with the base station to allow a user freedom of movement within some radius of the base station. The portable telephone offers a user “airtime” limited only by the endurance of the handset battery. This “airtime” is free to the user, who pays only for the wired connection.
The basic service provided includes voice traffic as with any normal telephone service. Another service that may be available is caller identification, which allows the caller's name and telephone number to be displayed on a handset display for observation by the user. Typically, the caller identification is data made available before a call is answered. The caller identification typically does not interfere with the voice traffic since it occurs before the voice traffic starts. Another service that may be provided is caller identification for a call that is waiting, that is, call-waiting caller identification. This data occurs during voice traffic and does interfere with the voice traffic by blanking or overwriting the voice traffic with the data to be displayed.
A steady stream of call-waiting caller identification data may significantly degrade the quality of the voice traffic making it difficult to continue a conversation. This is particularly true when a large data set needs to be transferred such as the case of refreshing the handset display. A portable telephone user may also want to use the handset display for a collection of other data or as a menu to select desired data. This data may encompass data from a private database or data that is available in the public sector, such as the Internet. Transferring large amounts of data or repetitively transferring smaller amounts of data will reduce the overall quality of the voice traffic.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a way to accommodate a collection of data over a portable phone without affecting the voice traffic on the phone.